Social networking websites and apps have had a tremendous impact on all of our lives, and on society as a whole. Some of it has been good, but unfortunately much of it has been bad. Just as we start to fully recognize the negative aspects of social media, a new generation of these services is now popping up which use blockchain technology and cryptocurrency tokens to change things for the better.

One such app is Kuende, which uses crypto tokens to incentivize and reward user behaviours and aims to tackle the degradation in real world social interactions wrought by our addiction to our phones.

There is now ample evidence that high use of social media can have a negative effect on our real world social interactions as well as causing depression and anxiety. I’m sure you are all familiar with the common clichés: the people who go out with friends, but spend the whole evening talking to people who aren’t even there instead; the concert goers who spend the whole time filming videos and taking photos instead of enjoying the music and dancing. But as Kuende says:

“social media is simply too much of a cultural cornerstone to give up completely. The ability to instantly connect to anyone, anywhere, has given the world a lot of good. People share ideas, stories, hobbies, goals and dreams all thanks to social media! The world simply can’t do without it.

So, Kuende is here to encourage real-world socialization while at the same time providing the convenience of a social media connectivity. “

You may be wondering how they will do such a thing. Well the answer is, of course, through using cryptocurrency incentives:

“By gamifying real-world socialization, we can make interactions fun and engaging for everyone. These social activities lead to more physical socialization and healthier, longer-lasting connections through the Kuende concept of incentivized challenges.”

Personally I think that sounds like a great combination of being both great fun, and also socially positive – a significant improvement over the status quo and an interesting alternative to the status quo.

There is already a web app and mobile apps which you can try out, and they feature loads of different ways that you can earn the network’s native crypto token ‘Kpoints’.

You get some Kpoints just for signing up, and then you can earn loads more for completing various tasks. Initially these tasks are mostly based around rewarding you for learning how to use the app. You can earn for completing your profile, creating a post a photo album or a playlist, liking other people’s posts, and even just for coming back and logging in daily – as well as a whole load of other things.

You can spend your points on things like posting to the global ‘discovery’ channel or on rating other posts you find there. If you add something to this section it could also earn you more tokens depending on how well it is received by other users.

The design of the site is quite nice and easy to use. It is also unique: they aren’t trying to create a copy of Facebook or Twitter with a few tweaks here, but rather an original experience different to what you’ve used before.

One of the things which stands out is the focus on music. Searching for new music is very easy, and they automatically grab the video for your favourite tunes from sites like YouTube for you to watch. You can have this video playing in the top corner or full screen, and you are free to keep moving around the site and doing other things while your music plays. Creating a playlist is also a nice experience using the drag and drop interface.

Although Kuende is yet to fully realize its vision of encouraging fun new real world interactions at this early stage, the app is developed enough to be very usable for following topics of interest, making friends and following other users, chat, listening to music and more. In addition, there is the possibility to earn quite a lot of their Kpoint tokens if you stick around and complete the little missions they give you.